The invention relates to a lifting door assembly comprising a lifting door, in particular a fast-moving industrial door or gate having a door leaf which covers a door aperture when the lifting door is in the closed condition, and a door lintel sealing device arranged in the area of a door lintel and mounted so as to establish a seal between door leaf and door lintel in a sealing position when the lifting door is in the closed condition.
From practice, various manners of configuring lifting doors are known. Thus, lifting doors are variously employed wherein the lintel-side end of a segmented armor is fixedly connected to a winding shaft which is present in the area of the door lintel. In the open position of the door, the door leaf is present being wound on the winding shaft, with the coil layers being in contact with each other. There are furthermore known so-called sectional doors in which the door leaf comprised of sections is usually deflected in the door lintel area and guided alongside underneath the ceiling when the lifting door is moved into its open position.
On the other hand, lifting doors of the type disclosed, e.g., by German patent applications DE 40 15 214 A, DE 40 15 215 A, and DE 40 15 216 A are of particular interest for the present invention, with the fast-moving spiral doors described there being realized as a burglary-proof and weather-resistant external door. The door leaf of these lifting doors comprises a plurality of segments which are connected to each other in a manner allowing them to be inclined relative to each other. In the open position of the door, the segments are present free of contact in a coil at the upper side of the door aperture, i.e., in the area of the door lintel.
The door leaves of such lifting doors need to have sufficient stability in all three spatial axes in order to be able to function as a reliable closure of the door aperture. As such rolling doors frequently need to separate spaces of different temperatures, it is generally advantageous if they produce an effective thermal insulation. In this context, reliable sealing of the lateral marginal areas as well as in the area of the door lintel particularly also plays a crucial role.
Sealing in the area of the door lintel was particularly found to be problematic in practice, for there, the distance of the door leaf from the adjacent edge of the door lintel frequently is not constant across its entire width of the lifting door. Thus it was found that such door leaves quite frequently bulge inwardly or outwardly, resulting in a distinctly different spacing from the door lintel that in the center area of the door leaf and at the lateral marginal areas thereof. Such inward or outward bulging may be brought about by bending stresses owing to the own weight of the door leaf or also owing to other influence quantities such as, e.g., a wind pressure or wind suction. This problem also occurs particularly distinctly when the segments of the door leaf are so-called double-walled segments with thermal isolation of the segment walls.
One example of such an industrial door is described in EP 1 251 236 A2. Here the segment walls of these segments that are formed with double walls are connected to each other at their longitudinal edges by a respective web which is formed of a material having a lower thermal conductivity than the material of the segment walls so as to produce a thermal isolation of the segment walls. The segment walls are typically manufactured of an aluminum alloy, while the webs in these known rolling doors are generally formed of a plastic such as, e.g., PMMA, PVC, or PC. In order to improve the thermal insulation effect, the cavities in the segments formed in this manner may also filled with a foam-type insulation material such as, for example, PS. If, in the case of such double-walled segments, highly different temperatures are present on the two sides of the door leaf, which may be the case, for instance, if the outside of the door leaf is exposed to intense insolation while the inside is shaded or the inner space is cooled by air conditioning or a cooling apparatus, then different longitudinal elongations occur in the two walls of a slat. In this example, this may result in a considerable flexure of the door leaf towards the outside. The problem is exacerbated with increasing temperature differences and greater widths of the door leaf. At greater door widths of 6 m or more, for example, the deflection of such a thermally isolated segment out of the plane of the door leaf proper may amount to as much as 100 mm at the center.
Such spiral doors, or generally lifting doors having a door leaf guided free of contact in the area of the door lintel, are prone to this problem in a particular degree, for at its end face the door leaf is not attached to a winding shaft which is capable of opposing flexure. The situation is different with conventional rolling doors as addressed at the outset. In those cases the topmost segment is connected to the winding shaft, thus preventing a flexure in this location, and the entire door leaf is moreover additionally stabilized by the winding shaft. This is equally true if a deflecting roller is additionally provided in the area of the door lintel, as was proposed, e.g., by DE 10 2004 063 924 A1, for the deflecting roller will then have a stabilizing effect on the door leaf being in contact with it.
In order to be able to securely avoid a collision between the door leaf, which may bulge under certain circumstances, and the door lintel even in the case of lifting doors having a door leaf guided free of contact in the area of the door lintel, the door leaf accordingly must be arranged at a corresponding distance form the door lintel. This does, however, render reliable sealing between door leaf and door lintel even more difficult.
In practice, sealing lips attached in the area of the door lintel are for example used for this purpose, which sealing lips contact the outside of the door leaf by their free ends. As the distance between the door leaf and the door lintel is not constant across the entire width of the door leaf due to the mentioned bulge of the door leaf, this type of sealing presents the problem that the seal should be formed in such a way as to produce a reliable sealing effect irrespective of the actually spanned distance. On the one hand, the sealing lips must therefore at any rate be soft enough to sealingly contact the door leaf across the entire width of the door, irrespective of the distance to be sealed between door leaf and door lintel, while on the other hand having to have a sufficient strength so as to contact the door leaf at a sufficient elastic pressure, to thus avoid the formation of a gap. In practice, this is achieved only in a very unsatisfactory degree, so that a reliable sealing effect can not be obtained with this type of sealing in the area of the door lintel.
In an equally known sealing system including a modification, it is provided to dispose the sealing lips on the outside of the door leaf in the area of the topmost segment or section. This variant also had only limited success in practice, for here the sealing lips will bulge jointly with the door leaf and correspondingly present inhomogeneous contact with the door lintel or furnish varying contact pressure across the width of the door. The sealing effect is therefore also limited in this system. Sealing lips of this type may accordingly only be utilized to advantage where a deformation of the element to be sealed—in the present case the door leaf—does not occur or only occurs in a slight degree. In addition, providing the sealing lips on the outside of the topmost segment or section results in a widening of the door leaf in this area, so that it is hardly possible to wind it on a winding shaft free of contact. But even in the case of a door leaf that is wound free of contact such as, e.g., according to EP 1 251 236 A2, such sealing lips have an interfering effect, for the single coil layers must then be guided at a correspondingly great spacing from each other. This would necessitate undesirably large dimensioning of the spiral section which is hardly sensible in the lintel area in practice.
An alternative sealing system provides so-called brush seals. A door leaf bulging across the door's width, however, involves substantially the same problems in regard of a limited sealing effect as in the case of sealing lips. The bristles will either not be in sufficiently pressurized contact owing to an excessively large distance, or the very bristles are exposed to a risk of being damaged at a small distance and a high contact pressure. Such brush seals are likewise disposed either at the door lintel or at the topmost segment or section; with regard to their usability in particular with spiral doors exhibiting high operating frequencies as in the field of industrial field of use, they give rise to the same problems as sealing lip systems.
German laid-open publications DE 103 39 506 A1, DE 103 48 543 A1, DE 10 2004 014 350 A1, and DE 10 2004 063 924 A1 furthermore each disclose a lifting door which has a door leaf comprised of horizontally extending segments that are connected to each other with tensile strength and in a radially articulated manner, with the topmost segment being fixedly connected to a winding shaft arranged in the area of the door lintel. When this lifting door is opened, the door leaf is wound directly onto the winding shaft. In order to avoid scratching of the wound segments, a sealing band of a wear-resistant and noise-attenuating material is moreover wound jointly so as to come to lie between the single layers of the segmented armor in the coil. In this lifting door assembly, a lintel seal is furthermore provided which is mounted rotatably at the door lintel and is closed by a catch, or drive member, when the segmented armor is closed. As the door leaf is here fixedly connected to the winding shaft, the lintel seal finally is in contact at the outer surface, i.e., at a major surface of the door leaf.
More detailed information on the type and structure of this lintel seal is not found in these documents, while the problem of bulging of the door leaf across the width of the door is equally not addressed. Thus, this known lifting door also exhibits the problem that reliable sealing in the lintel area across the entire door width can not be ensured when the door leaf happens to bulge. In particular, this prior art does not furnish any suggestion how this sealing problem might be solved particularly in the case of a lifting door having a door leaf which is wound free of contact when the lifting door is in the open position, which is of particular interest for the present invention.